I was physically out of shape. It wasn’t very much, I knew that, but I decided that at the very least I would exercise every morning, and I have done so ever since. I certainly was aware of the bathos of it, doing physical jerks and hoping this might be a step on the road to higher things.
The thought was beginning to nag at me—only just beginning—that my behaviour since I had left childhood, my ‘life-style’, was one that at any other time in history would have been described as corrupt, decadent, even degenerate. Yet it was this behaviour that I had taken my stand on, fought painful battles to gain and keep, actually felt defined me. (And all my generation too.) But the trouble was that if the balance swung too far the other way (as can always be seen going on, the swings from one extreme to the other), then the danger must be a reversion to the most bigoted and barren puritanism. And if so many of us had gone so far in the direction of sexual and every other kind of freedom, then the point of balance was surely already far into the regions of indulgence….These thoughts and others like them were so difficult—and as usual not to be shared with anybody—that I simply postponed them all.
Now I find it painful, embarrassing, how I thought about the ‘Search’, the ‘Path’, and yet I know that for a child of our culture, nothing much better could have been expected, that I was one of many.
We in the West, and in cultures permeated by Western values, expect everything. We have been promised everything, implicitly or loudly and openly. We believe we deserve everything good. Our reaction to being told that there is something there, a desirable thing—a great hidden treasure—is that we must have it. As a right. When I knew that there was this other world, the spiritual one—though using that word comes hard, for it is so debased—I had two strong reactions. First was scorn for my own culture, because it had so ignored this other world—but scorn came easily to me, and I was a long way off recognising that. The other reaction was a powerful grasping need, a secret exultation. It was greed, but I didn’t know it, thought it was laudable, that secret ‘Gimme, gimme’ that I was hugging to myself. Worse even than ‘Gimme’ was ‘I will do this, achieve this. I will.’
It is a common experience of people following a ‘Path’ that they look back at their first steps with shame, and regret that they can have been so very wrong.
And now I have a real, a serious difficulty. From now onwards—that is, from the end of the fifties—there was a main current in my life, deeper than any other, my real preoccupation. A few people will understand, because they have lived through something similar, but most I think will be indifferent or bored. And so I shall simply state it: this was my real life.
There is a tiny story from the Sufis and from a book called The Sufis, by Idries Shah. But I had not encountered Sufis yet.
A certain man is a prisoner on an island, but he does not know he is a prisoner and that there is more to life than prison life. A rescuer offers him an escape, on a ship, but he says, ‘Oh thank you, thank you, I’ll come, but I must bring my ton of cabbage with me.’
When I first read it, I thought, I could never be so stupid as to want to take a ton of cabbage—but alas, that ton of cabbage is hard to rid oneself of. In those early days I was saying far too often, ‘Of course I would never be so stupid as to…,’ whatever it was. And that brings me to another difficulty. If you are good at one thing, you unconsciously assume you are good at others too; if you have succeeded in one area, then you assume that that success ‘counts’ as good marks in another.
Again, this little tale of the prisoner will mean a great deal to a few people but nothing at all to others. And so, enough of that. People who are interested can pursue for themselves what it was I was studying. It was the Sufi teacher Idries Shah* with whom I was to discover—as I saw it then—my search rewarded. The books are available.
‘Surrendering’ independence was seen wrongly by me, because of ignorance and conceit, as I soon found out, but there was a real embarrassment, and annoyance. When I began to look around for some ‘Path’ or discipline, I kept quiet about it because the atmosphere of the time was so strongly against it, but the cult-crazy sixties was in fact easy to predict, particularly if I had remembered how our rigid atheistical dogmatic communist group ended in ghost tales and séances.
There was an incident at a party, in 1963. The room was crowded. Everyone had been in the Communist Party or near it. Somebody picked up a book and asked me, scandalised, ‘What’s this you’re reading?’
‘It is a book on Hatha Yoga,’ says I. Hatha Yoga is the physical discipline of Yoga. Exchanged looks, raised eyebrows, tactful changings of the subject. Within five years every one of these people would think nothing of saying, ‘No, I can’t on Wednesday; it’s my Yoga class.’
The real embarrassment, the continuing one, needs some quick and of course unsatisfactory generalisations. If you are a practising Christian, or have read books like The Cloud of the Unknowing for their literary qualities, then the word ‘mysticism’ does mean something serious. But this is not a culture, unlike some Eastern cultures, where it is unremarkable for people to look for a Guide, a Teacher, a Way, a Path—a discipline. Here in the West, most people if they hear you are interested in mysticism will at once start talking about ghosts, poltergeists, reincarnation, fortune-telling, the I Ching, UFOs, horoscopes. They think mysticism means exciting experiences of one kind or another. Yet there is no serious spiritual discipline anywhere in any culture that does not instruct its students to ignore all attractive sideshows, like ESP, and, if they do in fact experience ‘supra-normal’ phenomena, to regard them as distractions, as irrelevances.
I have not enjoyed being thought so silly-minded.
And again—enough of that.
I am going to put in here two poems, because poems can say in a few lines what you need pages of prose to say. Both come from the early sixties, but they belong here. As poems they are not particularly good, or bad. Old-fashioned, of course. Informative, though.
HERE
Here where I stand,
Here they have stood,
All with our flowering branches.
Behind us five locked doors.
Behind them snarl the beasts
That licked our hands before.
Dark it is, and dark.
Lord, how strange to bring me to this close.
They too have stood asking:
Who shut the doors?
Who taught our beasts to snarl?
Who, what brought me here?
If I stand here then
Where the dark came close
Then here must close the dark,
Yes, here the dark must close.
THE ISLANDS
The legendary islands are all very well,
But too strong a blast from there can set you wondering
If it’s angels or devils that hold them.
Small sniffs at a time, yes, that’s the way,
While the saving hands tutor a child
Or set new plants to grow.
When life beats too strong,
Promising more than this mind guesses at,
An underdrag of lethargy succeeds,
Filling where light was opening
With sleep like dirty water.
Then my doctoring, my knowledgeable hands,
Smooth white sheets or draw a cover up.
Once I thought the daily adding of small act to act
Food for the dulling of the heart,
Griefs and violence being the proper diet of liveliness,
Now, held back in every breath from folly of extremity
By what must be done, the here,
As frontiers are held by patience after war,
The quiet friend enters as my time-taught hands
Mix bread and set a damaged house to rights.
These verses should not be seen as anything more than a stage or step. The trouble is, people who are not on a Path, or Way, may be interested in those who are, but often take some tempo
rary stage, even one seen by the travellers themselves as mistaken, or unfortunate, as a final accomplishment or summit. The parallel in the literary field is when some reader or critic thrusts a page under your nose and says, ‘Look, you wrote this in 1953, you said it yourself, how can you deny it?’
I say I don’t like parties, don’t go to them, but there were a lot of parties. Many were in the Pipers’ house on the river, full of pretty children, and now it seems as if I was part of some idyll. No, life is not like that, but there are places and people so endowed with charm you don’t see anything but that. And, too—ironically—this fugitive from family life felt as if she was standing, forever excluded, on the edge of some magic land where all the unpleasant aspects of the family had been banished by a magic wand.
A scene: Peter and Anne are lying in bed, with their arms around each other, and I am sitting on the foot of the bed, and we are chatting about this and that. The door flies open, a daughter appears, and shrieks, hands dramatically raised, ‘What are you doing?’
‘We are having a cuddle,’ says Anne.
‘But…’ What the daughter is wanting to say is, But why am I excluded? ‘You’re disgusting,’ she announces.
‘We parents have our rights,’ remarks Peter peaceably.
‘I’m coming in too,’ says the daughter.
‘Then you’ll have to call all the others,’ says Anne. ‘Otherwise its favouritism.’
The girl emits a moaning shriek and runs off. ‘I hate you.’
Histrionic shrieks of laughter from here and there over the house. ‘Oh, they are so awful!’
In that family the unpleasant aspects of adolescence seemed to have been effortlessly transformed into attractive and certainly self-conscious theatricals.
Sometimes I sit and think about the especially good and nice people I have known, which is a way of making myself feel better in bad times, and David Piper—Peter—is always there. He was quiet and ironical and an observer, so he was not immediately remarkable. He died much too young, probably because he had been in a Japanese prison camp for some years, never a recipe for a long and healthy life. At the time I knew him, he was running the National Portrait Gallery.
Writing these memoirs, I have learned a good deal about memory’s little tricks, most of all how it simplifies, tidies up, makes sharp contrasts of light and shade. It simply cannot be true that the four years of Warwick Road were as bad as I remembered them, nor that Langham Street was all movement and pleasurable meetings. But the slow living through the fifties really was like crawling up out of a pit.
I look back on scenes in my flat, my small ugly flat, but crammed with people. I cooked extravagantly, because I enjoyed it. The faces are in my mind, but alas, not all the names. And what a mix of people, and of all ages too, for there were Peter’s friends and the children of friends. I have always asked everyone I know or whom I have even casually met to my parties, and it has always worked. There have been violent arguments sometimes, and then: How can you know that fascist/communist/neurotic/psychopath/idiot? But not often.
At one party—but now we are jumping ahead to the house in Charrington Street and a large gathering, about thirty, for a lunch—two women, together, came across the room to say, ‘Do you realise how extraordinary it is for us to see a woman doing this?’
‘Doing what? I don’t understand.’ One woman from New York, one from Moscow, and they had been conferring.
‘In New York, if you are a single woman you don’t have parties, you wait to be invited by married friends. You go into a kind of purdah until you find a man.’
‘And with us, no woman without a man would dare to have a party like this.’
I had not seen myself as out of the ordinary and had to take their word for it. But I was having two thoughts, one of them far from new: if you just do something, people accept it, whether it is socially customary or not. The other thought was that New York was being seen by us all as the acme of social sophistication, and surely Moscow should be free of all such middle-class taboos? Very soon would arrive the feminist revolution, and then it would be taken for granted—surely?—that a single woman could throw a party and invite anyone she wanted to.
A scene: Late-ish one evening, Lindsay Anderson came to my flat with a group of actors from the Royal Court, one being Robert Shaw, who would shortly marry Mary Ure, just being dumped by John Osborne. I had never met Robert Shaw, but he at once, as if carrying on some conversation we had been having, told me that he was sleeping with So-and-so, and this much improved sex with his wife, and wives should never object to their husbands’ sleeping around, for it was as good as an aphrodisiac. Women simply didn’t know what was good for them. He was full of the restless glitter actors bring with them off the stage. As for me, he had always adored me, he was meeting me at last, and so he went on for some minutes, while Lindsay listened, with a schoolmasterly air, and said from time to time, ‘Enough of that, Robert, now stop it.’ And then off they all went into the night, Lindsay shepherding them. ‘Now come on…enough…time for bed.’ Lindsay knew he was absurd, playing the role of fussy governess, knew he was infuriating, impossible. Yet he always was lovable, but why that should be so I have no idea. And that was the last I saw of Robert Shaw until they put on The Changeling at the Royal Court, Robert playing opposite Mary Ure, and everyone in the theatre knew that he was madly in love with her. ‘I love that woman!’ was delivered with such passion that life itself overthrew the play, and everyone applauded.
Edward Thompson came to see me. What about? It had to be about something. He wouldn’t have just dropped in for a cup of tea. Afterwards he stands in the street outside my flat. It is an ugly flat, in an ugly building, and the street is not inspiring. Edward raises his right fist and declaims to the sky: ‘Babylon! What am I doing in Babylon? I must leave.’ And shaking the dust of London from his feet, he departs for the healthful north.
Edward Thompson is in the middle of that process, being frozen into the past, as the Marxist historian of working-class Britain. But his contemporaries remember him as several times larger than most people, romantic, always in passionate debate, and with that kind of imagination that lights every scene he is part of or describes with generous hopes for humankind. I wish I believed that there were young Edward Thompsons growing up in Britain to take his place, but alas, we live in a grudging, cold, cautious time.*
Just before I left Langham Street, Play with a Tiger was at last put on, and I spent a good bit of time at the rehearsals, partly because I had become a good friend of Ted Kotcheff’s. While I liked Siobhan McKenna, it was not possible to be friends with her, because after the play she went off with seriously drinking friends to all-night parties, wild drunk-ups, erratic and defiant behaviour of all kinds, for she had to be the wild child, a broth of a woman. I simply did not have the stamina for it. This was what Ireland had made of her, the role she had been given, and she played it to the hilt, her long wonderful dark-red hair more often than not uncombed, her rich voice and vocabulary heard all over the theatre or wherever she was. At the risk of all kinds of accusations, I am going to say that to be an Irish artist is to carry an extra load. You are in Spain, you are at a dinner party, and there is the archetypical Irishman, with his wild poetic talk, his charm, and he is drunk, he says he is on a spree, he hasn’t been home for three days, and what will his poor wife say? His poor wife will have no alternative to doing what she has so often done—she must forgive him when he comes guiltily back. ‘Oh, how could you?’ But he can, he has, and will, again and again, because that is in the script, or perhaps is some sort of curse: if you are Irish and a poet, then here is written what you have to do.
I was in Dublin and visiting the poet John Montague. He was married to a French aristocratic woman, who could not have found life easy in that small flat, and he sat with a bottle of Irish whisky in his hands, and we listened and laughed, while his wife vacuumed the floor, he moving his legs this way and that to avoid the machine, and he said, ‘Fr
ench aristocrats, they are peasants really, isn’t that the truth, my darling?’ and she said, ‘Just as well for you I am, and if any more of your drunken friends arrive at the door I will not let them in.’ So he swung down those long thin legs of his to the floor and said, ‘Come on, we’ll go and see Behan.’ A couple of streets away lived Brendan Behan, the playwright. It was about ten in the morning. Brendan was sober when we arrived. We sat talking about—what else?—the Royal Court Theatre, and Joan Littlewood’s theatre, and the conversation was all good sense and theatre expertise. But a journalist was expected, from London. He was to come at twelve. We watched Brendan work himself into the part of a drunken Irishman. I saw that Brendan was watching Brendan adjusting his performance, creating this character who was currently so often in the newspapers, sometimes on the front pages. Brendan would take a mouthful of whisky from the bottle in his hand, say a few sentences, permitting them to show drunkenness, then another mouthful of whisky, and by the time the London man came, and we left them together, Brendan was at the height of his performance, the wild Irish poet. If the journalist had not been coming, I think we would have spent a pleasant, sober enough day, fit for conversation and very far from smashing things up and wild poetic ravings. But the script says a poetic Irish playwright has to drink, and the media confirm it. The media never wasted an opportunity to describe Brendan as wild and drunk, and so in the end the drink killed him, it did him in—now that was a big loss to the theatre and to the rest of us.
The person from the cast of Play with a Tiger whom I did see a bit was Maureen Prior, the one who was ill in bed when the script arrived but dragged herself up on a freezing day to audition, and got the part. Maureen Prior was warm, impulsive, with the gift of instant friendship, and her husband was judicious, cool, intellectual. I thought, Well, here we go again. What would happen if Nature actually liked it when two compatible people married—for instance, two warm, open, bubbly people, for surely joy would be unconfined—but then if two cool, detached, inhibited people married, I suppose they would never be able to get their arms around each other.